Monthly Archives: September 2011

OpenStreetMap has always made geographic data available for use in interesting and unexpected ways. As OpenStreetMap grows, the data becomes more difficult for some users to consume purely because of the volume of data.

The World at once

To have the whole World in your hand, download and use the planet file. Planet files are published every week. As mentioned above, some uses find this file large and cumbersome to deal with, especially if their interest is limited to a small portion of the data set.

In September 2011, the planet file was 18GB when compressed and about 250GB when loaded into a spatial database.

Smaller portions

If your interests are limited to a portion of the planet, then you’ll want to know more about planet extracts. Extracts are a portion of the OpenStreetMap data set.

Extracts are provided by third-parties for single countries and and also for regions that range from cities to states, provinces and continents.

The fifth annual OpenStreetMap conference, State of the Map, wrapped up in Denver, Colorado recently. Even if you were not able to join the fun in Denver, you can still enjoy parts of the event. Conference sessions were recorded by our friends at FOSSLC and many of those recordings are already available. You’ll also find audience video for some of the sessions.

Tagging a conference

If we were tagging SotM11 to add it to the OSM database, we might consider tags like:

conferencename = State of the Map, 2011

attendance = 273

attendance:prepaid = 258

attendance:walkin = 15

attendance:attendee_countries = 34

State of the Map 2012

The call for venues for State of the Map 2012 is expected in November 2011. The SotM 2012 venue will be announced early in 2012.

The Licensing Working Group has obtained explicit special permission to incorporate geographic datasets from data.gov.au in the OpenStreetMap project database published under any free and open license, including ODbL, provided that…
a) we provide primary attribution in a reasonable manner (currently the Attribution wiki page), and…
b) that we explicitly list there each dataset used to give useful feedback within the Australian government on how folks are using open data.

We have been careful to point out that (under ODbL) we are not asking folks who make visual maps from OpenStreetMap to provide secondary attribution to each and every contributor, so would not be in compliance with the CC-BY Australia 2.5 and 3.0 license their data is normally provided under. They have raised no objection to this.

The LWG would like to publicly thank data.gov.au both for providing open geographic data and for providing this permission.

A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world.

The elections for the new board members of the OSM Foundation (OSMF) are over: “Congratulations to our new board members: Richard Fairhurst, Matt Amos, and Dermot McNally. Mikel Maron was also re-elected for the board.

Several slides and videos of the State of the Map (SotM) 2011 in Denver are online. You will find everything here.

Some notes from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) Meetup at the SotM 2011 in Denver are listened here.

“The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is currently investigating the use of OSM for the capital of the Guinea-Bissau“. Read the full announcement here. You can help here!

So what’s with the Dragons? As OpenStreetMap grew, and acquired more computers to run the OpenStreetMap services, those computers needed names. These server names provide a way to refer to a specific piece of computer hardware, regardless of the services that device might currently provide. Naming servers according to a theme has a long tradition in IT circles. Typical server name themes include planets, constellations, characters from specific books or plays, and other popular culture references.

In 2008, the OpenStreetMap community decided to use dragon names as the theme for OSM server names. Dragon names were chosen as a tribute to the “Here be Dragons” marked on unexplored portions of maps and globes. Several other themes were considered including the names of cartographers and explorers.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation, and the Operations Working Group, would like to thank Nokia UK Limited for the donation of some of their redundant server hardware. This hardware has found new purpose in the form of “soup“[1] and “fiddlestick“[2], two new web front end servers. A third server “eustace“[3] will be used initially as a trial web statistics server.

The web front-end servers, soup and fiddlestick, replace puff and fuchur who had performed that role since 2008. Web front-end servers in OpenStreetMap provide the data browser and data layer, as well as user diaries and other “social” functions.

Eustace will debut in a new role for OpenStreetMap by collecting web statistics. The OpenStreetMap Foundation wants to know more about how users experience the OSM web site in an effort to improve the way that OSM services are delivered.

[1] Character from The Clangers, a UK children’s TV programme.
[2] Strangewood (1999): Fiddlestick, a small musically emotive dragon.
[3] Turns into a dragon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Chronicles of Narnia) after slipping on a gold bracelet.

Zark is the newest OpenStreetMap server. Give Zark a warm welcome. Continuing the in the tradition of naming OSM servers after dragons, the name “Zark” is taken from the Eidolon Chronicles/Shadow World books by Jane Johnson.

The first task for Zark will be to serve as a trial / evaluation server for the OWL – OpenStreetMap Watch List service. OWL’s popularity on the dev server has lead to performance problems and long update delays. After more than a year of development and increasing popularity of OWL’s ability to follow local changes without distracting “Big” changesets, moving OWL to Zark will make this service even more effective for mappers.

Thankyou to all of our candidates. This year we really had an excellent group of highly dedicated OSMers to choose from, and the choice was a difficult one. The relatively even spread of votes is reflective of this. We hope and expect that you will all play an active role in the foundation in 2011-2012.